An ongoing review of politics and culture

I will be getting an iPhone 3G Friday morning. That doesn’t, however, prevent me from finding this a bit silly:

One coming program, called iCall, will give you free phone calls when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another, called G-Park, exploits G.P.S. to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:” you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s G.P.S. and motion sensor.

Why not just press a button a pull up a list ranked by user ratings? Is the shaking and arbitrary selection really necessary? OK, so it’s neat, but does Apple (and its cadre of external app designer/programmers) really think we’re such dupes?

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Yes. Also, why have a magic eight ball when you could just list of all the possible responses to a question and go through them one by one with a team of rabbis?

I have a shakey button on my Sony Walkman Phone. The shakey button is appealing specifically because it is only neat, and serves no logical function. (Yes, you can use your Walkman as a pedometer, and you can shake your Walkman to shuffle your songs, but fundamentally a shakey button is cool because and only because . . . SHAKEYBUTTON!!!!)

Yeah, and why does Apple keep changing their iMacs. Isn’t a simple beige box good enough for them? And why do pinball machines have all those lights when just a simple counter would tell me all I need to know? And while we are at it, what’s the point of all those different clothes when a simple uniform of a cap, a jacket, and roomy slacks would perform the function just fine?

MouseJunior, actually a design that ties an action with a prototypical gesture appeals to a much wider population than to geeks. Shaking up a set of options before making a selection is such a gesture. We shake the dice before rolling them; shake a box of names before picking a winner; shake the magic eight ball before getting the answer; etc. The action makes sense, and it’s fun to do it on an electronic device because it’s unexpected.